Religions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: Russia's experience

The paper analyzes the changes in religious consciousness, cult-ritual practices and extra-cult religious activities that have occurred as a result of the “effect” of the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire religious sphere in the modern world has become totally dependent, firstly, on natural determinants in the form of a biological threat to humanity from the deadly virus COVID-19 and, secondly, it has come under the regulatory actions of social institutions. The double pressure of a natural and social nature brought religion to a new stage of evolution. The authors focus on strengthening of the phenomena of “personal” religiosity and the state of bricolage of religious consciousness; they analyze the changes in the “material religion”, in rites, the loss of the subject-practical embodiment of sacredness, as well as the transformation of interpretative practices in religious communities and the features of the intensification of the eschatological side of religiosity.